These 3 books had more impact than my degree
Easy reads, high value
So often career advice is fluff, full of clichés and contradictions—I'm not here to add to the pile.
Instead, I'll share three books that genuinely helped me work smarter and moved my career forward faster than anything else I've tried.
For each, I'll show you exactly how it made a difference in my career, and how applying the same lessons could help accelerate yours:
1. The First 90 Days – Michael D. Watkins
How it can accelerate your career:
This book is literally a step-by-step guide to smashing your first 90 days in a new role and sets you up for long term success.
It has practical frameworks for quickly understanding a new company's landscape, building critical relationships, and setting early wins that accelerate your impact and reputation.
First impressions are vital and this book will ensure yours are great.
A key framework from the book: The breakeven point
When joining a new company, you're initially consuming more value (knowledge, context, support) than you're creating. The Breakeven Point framework illustrates this clearly—typically, it takes around six months to reach the point where the value you've created equals the value you've consumed.
The First 90 Days provides actionable tools and strategies to dramatically shorten this timeline—from around six months to just three—enabling you to quickly become a net-positive contributor and continue accelerating your impact from there.
How I’ve implemented the learnings to drive outsized impact:
Before starting at Cleo, I used the structured approach from The First 90 Days to create a situational analysis. Leveraging insights from the interview process and independent research, it gave me a sense of the opportunities for growth.
Upon joining, I fast-tracked meetings with my team, key senior stakeholders, and company historians (employees with 4+ years at Cleo). By proactively scheduling standardised, insightful one-on-one conversations, I rapidly pinpointed critical weaknesses and high-leverage opportunities.
This enabled me to design and implement a 90-day action plan—allowing me to deliver strategic wins far earlier and with greater impact than would have been possible otherwise.
2. Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People – Ken Watanabe
How it can accelerate your career:
I’m a slow reader and completed this book in an afternoon. Honestly, buy it today, get it tomorrow and thank me by the weekend.
This short, powerful book provides you with straightforward, practical frameworks for tackling complex problems efficiently. Mastering these problem-solving skills will set you apart in your organisation, turning you into someone who doesn't just highlight problems but consistently delivers effective solutions.
Framework from the book:
When solving problems, people love to think of solutions.
Look at the below diagram about Sam’s Coffee company. Sam’s Coffee manager knows there are 1,000 people in town, but only gets about 60 visitors per week. She creates a flow diagram (below) to visualise the issue and concludes awareness must be low. Naturally, she starts considering solutions like an expensive high-street ad:
However, having read Problem Solving 101, she decides to test her assumptions first. She interviews 50 locals on the high street, asking if they know about Sam’s Coffee, if they’ve visited, and why they might not be returning.
The reality she discovers is different from her assumption:
Awareness isn't the issue—most people know Sam’s Coffee but mistakenly think it's too expensive, or they're disappointed by the lack of cake variety.
Now, instead of wasting money on a high-street ad, she has clear, targeted solutions:
Attract new visitors: Introduce a "free cake with coffee" promotion to overcome price perception.
Retain customers: Expand the menu to include brownies and carrot cake, improving repeat visits.
Within a week, she triples her new customer count—simply by properly diagnosing the problem first.
This approach makes you an effective problem solver who consistently delivers impactful results.
How I use this in my career: problem diagnosis
I use these types of frameworks daily in my role and helping my team identify solutions to problems. Here’s a segment from a recent post where I talked through an example of this diagnosis, which targeted our brainstorm for solutions.
Metric Trees—stop guessing, start tracing the problem
When a key metric tanks, most teams throw wild guesses at the problem.
A metric tree forces you to diagnose properly:
📉 ROAS drops? Check LTV and CPA.
📉 CPA increases? Check CPC and CVR.
📉 CVR is down? Check landing page quality, audience targeting, or incentive strength.
Most marketers skip this and start tweaking ad creative. Wrong. Blaming an algorithm or creative before diagnosing the problem properly is like buying new golf clubs because you can’t putt straight.
3. The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss
How it can accelerate your career:
This book is a wildcard. It challenges traditional views of productivity by emphasising efficiency, automation, and bold experimentation. By reshaping how you approach work, it helps free up your time and encourages calculated risks, allowing you to gain experience and skills outside of your daily role.
How I use this in my career: INCA Glasses
Inspired by this book, I launched INCA Glasses, a side hustle selling blue-light-blocking glasses for screen use. The business broke even but wasn't scalable enough to continue, whilst some glass company in Sheffield were threatening to take me to court over copywrite, so I closed it after three years. However, this side project rapidly and practically taught me:
Business accounting and P&Ls
Commercial strategy and pricing models
Supply chain management (sourcing products internationally)
Shopify e-commerce setup and management
These skills enabled me to seamlessly transition into senior roles. I was equipped to hold leadership team conversations about commercial strategy, operations, and accounts—areas that previously might have felt outside my scope. The result: accelerated career growth and broader business credibility.
The bottom line:
✅ Great career progress is about putting in the hours AND how smartly you use your time.
✅ Continuous learning, even in small doses (think commuting or lunch breaks), will dramatically accelerate your trajectory.
✅ Ask people on a career path you want to follow, what books had the biggest impact on their career and read them.